a. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns a method and an apparatus for adjusting the vibration frequency of vibrating objects, and more particularly it relates to a tuning system of musical instruments, chimes and the like.
B. Description of the Prior Art
Vibrating objects of musical instruments and the like are such that their vibration frequencies tend to undergo wide variation because of various conditions such as trifle dimensional errors of the vibrating objects developing at the time of their manufacture or uneven quality of the materials with which the vibrating objects are made or the conditions at the time the vibrating objects are assembled in musical instruments. Accordingly, in, for example, musical instruments wherein precision vibration frequencies are required of the vibrating objects, adjustment of the vibration frequencies of the vibrating objects, i.e. the so-called tuning operation, is necessarily conducted upon completion of the assemblage of each musical instruments. In particular, adjustment of the vibration frequencies or tuning of the strings of such musical instruments as piano requires to be conducted with a high precision. Such tuning has been done in the past by well-trained tuning experts.
Such known tuning, however, has been conducted by a tuning art which entirely relies upon the acoustic sense of the tuner who attends to the tuning of a musical instrument. For this reason, it has been difficult to always obtain musical instruments of equal quality.
Also, in the above-discussed conventional tuning operation, it has been difficult for a tuner to exercise his acoustic sense sufficiently by listening to just one decay sound of a string of a piano which is produced by a single percussion of this string. Therefore, it has been usual that the tuner proceeds on the tuning operation by striking a string many times repeatedly with a hammer. Thus, the tuning of, for example, a piano consumes a very lengthy period of time.
On the other hand, as a means for solving such problem of the conventional tuning art, there can be considered a method of tuning which is conducted by causing continued vibration of a vibrating object and by progressively bringing the vibration frequency of this vibrating object to agree with the reference frequency while carefully and steadily comparing these two. Such tuning method is relatively suitable for the tuning of such a vibrating object that can be vibrated continuously for a relatively lengthy period of time to permit tuning during this period of time. However, this tuning method is not suitable for the tuning of a vibrating object which does not allow one to obtain continuous vibration, for example, a musical instrument such as clarinet whose timing requires to be performed by taking out its tuning member, i.e. the reed portion, from the body of the instrument.